The great adventures of a w-space dweller and his alts in Eve Online.Current project: Figuring out what's new after being away for half a year.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

WH-Intel: The contact labels

When you lurk around in w-space intelligence is king.

You often stumble upon scouts that jump through wormholes, PI-alt's that jump into Epithals, and nasty cloaked Proteis that jump... well, you if they can. As soon as I encounter something, I have the habit of not only getting "info" on the pilot, but also add him to my contacts and watchlist. This enables me to compare him/her and his corp to any POS'es I have found, or might find, thereby placing him/her in a known system in the chain. This might be useless info, but it might also be crucial. You simply don't know.

I used to also set their standing accordingly. This was an attempt to separate different groups from each other, more than to represent a real "threat level". Known, larger w-space alliances I have set red, just to quickly identify their scouts and their pilots in local, on those rare occasions when I'm actually in Empire. Temporary targets (neighbors and folks I'm currently in contact with) I usually set to orange. If you add them to watch list, you immediately get a handle on if they are online, if they just logged on or off, etc...

However, this way, one tend to collect a number of contacts that needs categorizing. One also need to occasionally remove old ones. This could be a real hassle if you don't have a system of some kind - enter the labels!

Since a Rubicon 1.3 you can add labels to your contacts when you add them, which makes it much easier to keep a system working. If you have not started to use contacts and labels in this way, you really should! At least if you want to be a provider of information for your corp and not just a consumer. Create your own system that suits your needs. Remember that one contact can be labeled with many different labels, so a system with mutual exclusive labels is not optimal.

I have currently two different types of labels going; to where pilots belong, and what they typically been seen flying. Something like this;

Target - the current enemy, or the ones I'm targeting

Targets friend - the same alliance or somebody living in the same WH

C2 Inhabitants, etc.. - a way to keep track of different groups in a chain

I also set a few labels when the pilot obviously have a focused skill-set;

Carebear - been seen flying only mining barges or industrials

Scout - your typical cloaky dude, easy to forget that he might be around

Fighter - someone that been seen flying any kind of pvp ship.

This way, I can easily get a good feeling for who is on and not, and what kind of threat the ones that are on might be.